What Bill Withers can do that I can't
is communicate the intensity of friendship
without mawkishness or trivia. 
Told 'all you want to do is use me'
he turns it around 
demanding that we use him, lean on him --
knowing that later he'll need to lean back.
He's so serious about friendship
he says he's sorry and then writes a song 
about the apology.  And not just his words, 
his voice opens out 
call and response --
call me
when you need a friend
call me
I want to spread the news:
yes, what Bill Withers can do is to church,
not the noun, the verb,
to church, to holler, to be there 
when the congregation hollers.
And he keeps telling us that what's important, 
in churching, is what the hands do.
His Grandma's hands play the tambourine on Sunday morning
and they ache and swell when they lift too much;
Bill Withers writes whole songs about 
what hands are for, like writing letters,
and what they're not for, like shooting guns.
Yes, what Bill Withers can do that I need to learn
is to use his voice not for abstract "change"
but for communication,
for making community.
         
What Stevie Wonder can do that I can't
is to have visions.  Not the mundane fantasies
of crystal new age but the concrete visions
you can only have if you're blind,
and your society defines you by
something you'll never see:  your skin color.
His innervisions are true because they're 
embedded in life in the city,
in the lies of politicians who haven't done nothin',
in the rejection of superstition,
the visions of someone who knows that 
reaching for higher ground is work:
learning warring lying dying 
teaching preaching loving and believing.
It takes vision to struggle over rough terrain
but it's the struggle, not the vision, that gets you higher.
Stevie Wonder tells how music affords 
equal opportunity to sing, dance and clap hands,
you can feel his voice all oh-oh-over.
What Stevie Wonder sees and I need to learn
is that music is the only taste we have now of freedom --
a freedom freer than the free that man defines,
so free that only the blind can see it.
         
What Otis Redding can do that I can't
is to strut.  He can give you what you want
butcha got to go home with him -- if I talked
that shit you'd laugh me out the house.
But Mick Jagger does talk that shit
and that's really scary, because 
Mick acknowledges no vulnerability 
while Otis knows sex is just the other side of pain.
He says "I'm gon' sing this song to everybody who's unhappy,"
and the way he moans
pain in my haw-aw-eart
the shape of the tremble flat-sharp-circling-the-note 
brings on a complex catharsis
entirely different from macho.
Otis Redding knows that 
manhood without ambivalence is just posturing --
and he knows it because though he's just as angry as I am
he knows that anger expressed the wrong way
can get you lynched.  Sitting unemployed on a dock in 
Frisco Bay, remembering Georgia,
knowing crisis is in both places,
Otis Redding can wait,
not because he's passive
but because the moment to strike doesn't always arrive.
What Otis Redding teaches that I need to know 
is to live in time:
he knows I'm impatient --
he's impatient too,
and even so, 
he keeps on.
Copyright Kenny Mostern 1999